Month: January 2021

Building Blocks

Collaboration Through Student-Centered PLCs

Collaboration

By: Shanna Towery, South Carolina ELA Teacher

Greeting a classroom full of students and then closing out the rest of the school world with a firmly shut door seems to be the norm for many classroom teachers today. The autonomy afforded to teachers has its benefits, but it can also be detrimental to the mental health of teachers as well as the overall culture of a school.  

What’s Wrong with Collaboration?

It would be hard to pinpoint exactly what is to blame for the general ill-will often felt by educators towards collaboration or the dreaded PLC. Maybe it’s the sense of competition garnered from high-stakes testing or the half-hearted attempts at professional development where many teachers are sure to be found half-listening with a stack of ungraded papers.  Whatever the cause, the real casualties when collaboration is not fostered, encouraged, and celebrated are the ones who need it the most–our students.  

Collaboration:  For the Students or For the Students?

Most teachers would agree that students are social creatures.  As such, we can utilize their tendencies for communication through class discussion, turn-and-talk strategies, or collaborative groups as effective teaching tools.  In this sense, educators are encouraged to use collaboration among students to foster learning in the classroom, but are teachers as willing to collaborate together to ensure every student truly learns?  How often do teachers meet in your building to use real classroom data to authentically discuss student progress, successes, needs, for enrichment?  

A tree, in a forest, with a question mark painted on it.
Photo by Evan Dennis on Unsplash

For too many schools, the answer to these inquiries would be disappointing to advocates for professional collaboration. Why is it that collaboration among students in the classroom is a non-negotiable, while the adults in the building do their best to cling to their autonomy?  When did we outgrow communication as a means to deepen and build mutual understanding? How can we be so willing to participate in discussion forums, Facebook groups, book clubs, or Bible studies, but hesitate to collaborate with the colleagues in our buildings?  And most importantly, what can we do to turn this around?

PLC:  More Than Meets the Eye

Bulls-eye
Photo by Oliver Buchmann on Unsplash

Professional Learning Communities have gotten a bad rep thanks to half-hearted attempts done simply to check a proverbial box.  In reality, PLCs have so much more potential and value when utilized correctly.  While book studies and grade level/department level meetings are important and definitely have their place in a positive school climate, the kind of PLCs I have found success with are more about student achievement than they are teacher-centered.  In this type of PLC, teachers would meet together prior to teaching to discuss learning goals and objectives. The teachers would not discuss activities or lesson plans so much as they would discuss what they truly wanted their students to gain from upcoming lessons.  Only when the goals have been identified would teachers discuss how best to teach for the goals as well as how they would know whether or not the goals had been met (think: assessments).  After teaching, the teachers would gather the data from the classroom assessments and meet again to compare notes and discuss patterns, ahas, or concerns.  A step often missed here is what to do next–will re-teaching be necessary? Is there room for enrichment?  And with true Professional Learning Communities, the cycle would then begin again!  

Literacy coaches will recognize what I have described as student-centered coaching cycles (Sweeney, 2011), but as evidenced by a professional development session I was privileged to attend with select members of my district through Solution Tree, this type of PLC has various formats and can take place with or without a literacy coach.  Ideally, proper school leadership would encourage this type of student-centered learning approach throughout the building, but all it takes is a few teachers willing to work through a few cycles for it to catch on. As a 6th grade ELA teacher, I was able to conduct a few cycles with a 7th grade social studies teacher last spring before school ended abruptly to offer some insight to her regarding disciplinary literacy.  We put our individual expertise together to determine goals for “reading” primary documents and then analyzed data together to inform her teaching.  I was able to help her create a rubric for assessment based on our goals and it became very clear through this process what students were understanding and what needed to be re-taught or further scaffolded. It was such a refreshing and rewarding experience to feel that we were collaborating in a way that would truly be useful to both teaching and student learning!  Afterwards, I was able to carry the type of work we had done into my grade level ELA planning meetings.  

A Call to Action

Brick wall with "Together we create" painted on it.
Photo by “My Life Through A Lens” on UnsplashBr

After years of thinking I knew all there was to know about PLCs and professional development, I found this reimagining of the student-centered PLC to be just the kind of collaboration I could get behind. My hope is that others will see how incredibly beneficial collaboration can be when professionals are willing to meet together on behalf of their students in a non-judgemental or threatening way.  Our students deserve it!  

Sweeney, D. (2011). Students-centered coaching: A guide for K-8 coaches and principals. Corwin

About the Author

Shanna Towery has sixteen years teaching experience across a total of four school districts in South Carolina.  She is a recent M.Ed. graduate from Clemson University and is currently a 6th grade ELA teacher.  

Student Collaboration in the Virtual Classroom

Collaboration

By: Victoria Young, a South Carolina Teacher

When I began teaching virtually this school year, I was excited to utilize all of the technological resources and techniques I learned in university that I hadn’t had the chance to try out. However, as most teachers know, it is almost impossible to effectively teach content in a meaningful way to kids when they are unable to connect with the content and one another. In the virtual classroom, students are unable to simply turn to their neighbor and discuss a problem or quickly whisper questions and comments to one another in class. Sure, no teacher will deny the fact that the mute button is a game changer for classroom management, but they will agree that it does damage the classroom community. The social barrier created by virtual learning seemed to put the important skill of collaboration on hold for this generation of students. So how do we as teachers reignite this connectivity in the virtual classroom?

Tip #1: Build confidence with anonymity

Photo by Philippe Bourhis on Unsplash
Photo by Philippe Bourhis on Unsplash

For me, it was a long process filled with patience. The first day of school is always awkward; but with technical difficulties and lack of participation, the first day shyness lasted the first two weeks. The way I approached a lack of classroom engagement was by treating virtual classes like a shy kid. You know the one – shoulders hunched, little eye contact, and always chooses to do the group assignment alone without asking. With tools such as Nearpod, Polleverywhere, and Google Forms, I did activities in and out of class that allowed students to express themselves and their thoughts and opinions with anonymity. As a class, we would see how we all think alike or learn new perspectives. I would ask for opinions on silly things like what I should eat for lunch for kids who are more outgoing to speak up without pressure of being ‘wrong’. When the more outgoing kids started to lead the way with the easy interactions, I saw that even the quieter students begin to speak up in the chat or even unmute! Eventually, through these distant interactions, I noticed more and more students interacting in class in day to day conversations and in content related discussions. They began to gain confidence once they saw that they are safe to share their ideas.

Tip #2: Use mainstream tools to your advantage

Photo of social media phone apps.
Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash

Once we broke the 10 layers of ice, I began to do more collaboration boards and Flipgrids without anonymity in order to encourage more discussion in class. In my very social classes, I have even gone on to do partner projects through remote learning. Middle and high school students are on every type of social media; so many of my students chatted via Snapchat, Instagram, and even Discord. Other students with less access to social media simply communicated via email. All that to say, students are collaborating all the time, we just have to use their methods to our advantage! (If you can’t beat them, join them!) I was never given any issues with participation despite how different this form of collaboration is and how it appears more arduous than simply sitting next to a partner in class. It is as if the ability to collaborate without a teacher facilitating every step was freeing; therefore, I began to see their personalities shine through their work.

Tip #3: Find common ground

Of course, not every class can achieve the same level of collaboration in the virtual world. That doesn’t mean, however, that it can’t be achieved! One of my classes’ favorite activities is to play Among Us as review before an assessment. While talking about our weekend plans, I told my students I was going to play video games with some friends. This built a quick connection between me and my classes. Eureka! We finally had something in common besides being stuck in quarantine. On Gimkit.com, there is an activity that allows students to review material while playing in a similar format of the popular game Among Us. Students get very competitive and have to interrogate one another in order to win. There are also several other games that allow collaboration; but I always start with a solo game to help students get used to the mechanics. Nothing says virtual like video games and they are a great way to build community and collaborate in order to learn! 

No matter the grade level or content you teach, collaboration is achievable in your classroom whether you are in person or online (or both!) this school year. Remember that at the end of the day, the goal of collaboration is to build relationships and problem solving skills. If you notice that your student collaboration is lacking in the qualitative results you want in your content, try to treat it more as a social skill. If you nurture your classroom’s environment first with collaboration, the learning will come along with it. Find a common interest, talk to a child or teen about what they like to do in their free time, and use those things to your advantage! Take away the fear of failure and show that you are all just as human as each other and soon your students will see that learning can be found all around us, not just in a school or textbook. And isn’t that the most powerful lesson that we can teach?

About the Author

Victoria Young, B.A. Secondary Education/Social Studies, is a geography and world history teacher at Greenville Technical Charter High School in South Carolina.

Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash

Misery Loves Company or Better Together?

Collaboration

By: Charlene Aldrich, retired South Carolina Literacy Instructor

In education, there are times when it’s a little bit of both.  I like to believe that Better Together overcomes Misery so that Company discovers possibilities rather than ponders problems.  

Too often educators, unknowingly, develop a silo mindset in their quest to accomplish everything that needs to be done to meet everyone’s needs – the state, the district, the administrators, the students, the parents, and the support staff members.  It’s a gradual process and, unlike the business definition of a silo mindset, is a re-action rather than a pro-action. A silo mindset in business develops when co-workers refuse to work together as a team – hoarding resources and hiding ideas that benefit the whole.  Personal recognition trumps the greater good.  Fear of losing out overshadows building relationships.

Photo by Jari Hytönen on Unsplash

In education, however, silo mindsets develop in response to overwhelming workloads, little downtime, and too much paperwork!  It becomes easy to say, ‘I don’t have time to collaborate,’ and ‘I just want to get home.’  There’s not even time to contemplate the fact that ‘better together’ results in efficient and effective instruction as well as developing a support network. I’d like to suggest three ways to promote collaboration in a school:  grade level, content area, and schoolwide.

Intradisciplinary Collaboration

Intradisciplinary collaboration within a school is big picture collaboration; it involves planning curriculum that has continuity, scope, and sequence from an intro course to the AP offering.  Long-term planning such as this happens outside of the regular school year.  The biology team or the Algebra team or the Honors ELA team meets at least two times a year: one to look back and one to look forward.  Another model is a two-day retreat with the same idea – looking back and looking forward.  Priorities include sequenced content area text resources, scaffolded instruction from course to course, and intentional development of disciplinary literacy practices. Collaboration between teachers who teach the same courses should focus on dissecting the course standards into individual lessons to develop content area knowledge necessary to meet them.  

Grade Level Collaboration

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Grade level collaboration, on the other hand, is an ongoing effort among colleagues to develop ways to build relationships between the content of each other’s courses.  In an effort to provide real world connections and context for learning, teachers work together to plan content overlap that is mutually reinforcing.  Literature pairs well with history; mathematics pairs well with business and economics.  The arts curriculum overlaps with history as artists’ and musicians’ compositions reflect the culture in which they were created. Lyrics in music correlate to poetry in ELA. Sciences and math are mutually reinforcing; construction trades, culinary, and physical education include math calculations, conversions, and statistics.  And every content area has significant people whose lives are told through biographies and autobiographies which are just one of the many categories of literature taught by ELA teachers.  

Collaborating across a grade level doesn’t even have to be synchronous to be effective. Connected content introduced in one discipline becomes background knowledge in preparation for future content of another discipline; it also serves as a source for applying content knowledge to new learning situations. Long term retention is accomplished as connected content surfaces a variety of courses that review, connect, and extend content for deep understanding.

Synchronous School-wide Collaboration

Synchronous school-wide collaboration is possible several times a year in response to awkward calendar planning.  For example, the day of Halloween and the day after Halloween are sometimes void of learning because excitement replaces focus.  Thematic collaboration on these isolated days rescue students and teachers from wasted time and potential behavior management issues.  Two days of hype and sugar-highs are replaced with inquiry and fact-finding: history, cultural celebrations, economic impact, spending statistics, chemistry, nutrition, poetry, drama, short stories, music, art, and even physical education!  All it takes is a little creativity mixed with a lot of enthusiasm to connect content, include a course requirement, and engage students throughout the school around a common theme two or three times a year. I can personally recommend this NewsELA article as a place to begin: 

https://newsela.com/read/halloween-spending/id/46288/?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=web (It will ask you to make an account to read the article; the article as well as all of their ‘news’ articles are free.  Other content needs a subscription.  All of their free news articles make great themes for collaboration or connecting to specific lessons in your content area.)

What are the ‘down days’ at your school? There should never be a class day that a student can say, ‘It’s Halloween. The teachers never do anything important on Halloween. I can stay home.’  If you are reading this, then you may be the one who can make collaboration happen in your school!  Find the First Follower in YOUR school and do it! 

About the Author

After 20 years of growing literacy in under-prepared college students, Charlene retired to focus on state-wide literacy initiatives such as LiD, 6-12 and her R2S approved literacy courses at College of Charleston.  She lets her life speak by empowering teachers to have the confidence and competence to implement a literacy model of instruction in any content area and at every grade level. Her best Covid-19 memory is teaching her grandson Algebra 1 via phone calls, Zoom, text messaging, and FaceTime.  It was online instruction at its best – synchronously and interactively.

Photo by Jeffrey F Lin on Unsplash

Literacy Coaching During A Pandemic

Collaboration

By: Meagan Wagner, South Carolina Middle/High School Teacher

Photo by Hello I’m Nik 🎞 on Unsplash

Coloring pages.  That’s what it took, this week, to motivate my eighth grade boys’ book club to read their assigned pages in the novel. Donuts weren’t appealing and candy is lackluster after Halloween. Yes, I bribe students with goodies. Or, in educator-speak, I provide extrinsic motivation for my students. And if you thought coloring pages would be too elementary for teenagers, then you’d be wrong. I am their literacy coach – and they do not receive a grade from me, so creativity is required to engage and motivate. In fact, that last statement pretty much sums up what it is like to be a literacy coach during a pandemic.  

In a normal, non-COVID-19 school year, being a literacy coach means fulfilling many duties. Organizer of novel sets. Assessor of reading fluency and comprehension. Analyzer of standardized testing data. Listener to teacher meltdowns. Bulletin board decorator. Book pusher.  My daily role also consists of working within English language arts classrooms as a co-teacher of sorts, pulling struggling readers for reading strategy conferences, conducting walkthrough observations in classrooms, and designing/facilitating professional development opportunities for my faculty. This is not that sort of year.  

Photo by Andy Falconer on Unsplash

COVID-19 presented unique parameters within my rural school district. First, the last time we saw our students was six months prior to when they returned to buildings on a new alternating-day hybrid schedule. Second, we were quickly distributing devices to students for the first time ever, because our schools were adamantly NOT one-to-one with computers. Third, many families chose our district-provided virtual option. In an English language arts (ELA) class that would normally consist of twenty-eight students, and would benefit from my co-teaching assistance, we might have eight students on a strong attendance day; most days are not strong attendance days. Fourth, my colleagues are balancing the workload like never before: creating in-class lessons that are not allowed to include group work, providing additional work for the students’ at-home days, providing quarantine packets for students sent home, all while learning new technology.  

Making Collaborative Adjustments for COVID-19

I knew before walking into the building in August, that this was not the time to be a normal literacy coach. Co-teaching in a group of eight or less might not be the best use of my time. Conducting walkthroughs to identify instructional needs is NOT a good idea right now — this is not a normal instructional year. Professional development opportunities on incorporating literacy into the content areas is obviously not a priority. This does not mean that my role is not important or valuable for teachers during this time. Creativity is required to engage and motivate  teachers AND students.

Coaching Priority #1 – Determine the Best way to support the teachers.

In the same way that we differentiate for students, we should differentiate for teachers. My sixth grade teachers wanted help with grammar: so weekly lessons from me are a go. My seventh and eighth grade teachers wanted to be able to reserve times with me instead of having an assigned visit per week because, too often, my assigned time in their class was filled with helping students who came back from quarantine, or organizing a messy student’s binder.

Photo by Eric Rothermel on Unsplash

While these activities have their merit, it was not the best use of my time. Therefore, I created a Google Doc schedule and shared it with my department. This engaged and motivated my teachers to use me in new ways.  They have booked me for stations and review lessons, re-teaching small groups, book clubs, and read alouds. As a department, we saw a need to help students learn how to pick out books that are good choices for them.  A series of stations and book talks ensued. My high school teachers wanted help furthering independent reading interest for students they only see in person twice a week. I began booktalk videos and trailers that they could provide via technology.  

Coaching Priority #2 – Be the voice of encouragement

Teachers, not just in English language arts, were reporting burnout and lack of encouragement. I began walkthrough snapshots — as a means to celebrate the amazing adjustments seen in classrooms. I visit the room, take photos with permission, and leave a note for the teacher that lists all the positives I saw happening. Feedback suggested that teachers want to show off the ways they are adjusting — and rightly so. They are doing amazing things with technology, social distancing, and keeping themselves safe all the while. I have since seen my snapshot celebration forms hanging above teacher desks.  

Every stakeholder in education has made major changes to adjust to COVID-19.  Administrators, parents, students, teachers, coaches, secretaries, media specialists, custodians, and so many more.  The fact that we have managed to rise to the occasion is something to be celebrated and to unite us.  We are all in this together and we will do whatever it takes — even if that means printing coloring pages.

About the Author:  

Meagan Wagner, M.Ed., NBCT, is a literacy coach for middle and high school in South Carolina. She is also a doctoral candidate at the University of South Carolina, in Curriculum & Instruction.